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Iran Makes Trade, Not War, with Eurasia

OWON: Eurasia is where the growth will be. Not to be a part of it is to lose a seating place, in the future of trade that this will bring. All of Asia, all of Europe, we need American bases for what???Enough of US Cabal hegemony.Close the bases, bring the Agencies under Congressional control and arrest the Cabal. Get Americans back to work and not as Military attacking the world. America needs to earn money, not hatred. Jobs for Americans, not Jobs for the boys!

If the intent of the Obama Iran strategy was to woo the great Persian nation to the West in a complex geopolitical game, and turn her against Russia, China and the emerging Eurasian Century being constructed around China’s One Belt, One Road project, it is emerging as another colossal failure. The newly-sanction-free Iran, far from becoming a pawn of NATO intrigues, is making rapid and brilliant moves to connect with her Eurasian neighbors. What a contrast to the Saudi-Turkish moves to connect with murder, rape and destruction in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and beyond in the name of Allah and oil.

One week after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s historic visit to post-sanctions Iran, where the two countries signed major trade agreements including bringing Iran fully into the emerging strategic New Economic Silk Road and Maritime Road blueprint, China launched a new maritime shipping route to Iran. Two days before that, the first freight train departed China for the Islamic Republic.

Anyone who has experienced the industriousness of the Chinese, once they define a major goal, will not be surprised. Still, it shows the strategic priority Beiing is giving to integrate Iran, a centuries-long ally of China going back to the ancient Silk Road, into its unfolding Eurasian economic space. Events to flesh out Iran’s integration into the Eurasian One Belt, One Road are moving on both sides very rapidly. Clearly, at the next annual Shanghai Cooperation Organization annual meeting later this year, Teheran will also be invited to full membership status in that organization now that sanctions are lifted as well, firming a growing political and economic bond with the nations of Eurasia following years of sanctions and isolation.

On February 1, an Iranian container ship arrived at Qinzhou Port in China’s southern Guangxi Province, facing the Beibu Gulf or Gulf of Tonkin, near Vietnam. The arrival of the Iranian ship, Peranin, delivering 978 containers from “several countries along the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road,” China’s designation for the maritime part of its vast One Belt, One Road strategy, marked the opening of the first shipping route linking the Middle East and the Beibu Gulf.

Two days earlier, China’s first freight train set off on a two-week maiden voyage to Iran from the southeastern trade hub of Yiwu in the central Zhejiang Province. This is a prelude to construction of the new high-speed rail infrastructure that will break Iran’s economic isolation and open that great land with its vast human and mineral resources, to join the emerging economic boom that is developing across Eurasia. This Eurasian economic boom, set to be the greatest economic expansion for the world economy of the past two centuries, began some two years ago when President Xi defined the details of his landmark One Belt, One Road and announced creation of an Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Beijing to help finance the huge construction project, now estimated to cost almost one trillion dollars over the next decade.